Funny Picture

Dan O'Bannon was known for his work on DARK STAR, ALIEN, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and TOTAL RECALL. Not a bad run for a science fiction screenwriter. Over the course of 35 years, he also wrote a book about screenwriting, which is now coming out a few years after his death.

(That alone is impressive, because these days publishers seem primarily interested in books only if the author will be out there beating the drum for his book. An author needs a "platform." )

It's a little hard for me to critique a screenwriting how-to book. If the author is saying sensible things, he's saying things that most professional screenwriters know, although we probably all crystallize the rules in our own way. I've got my own book and my own approach. And it's hard for me to remember what I didn't know when I was just learning how to do this.

But I did enjoy DAN O'BANNON'S GUIDE TO SCREENPLAY STRUCTURE. I like that he doesn't just analyze screenplays that hew to traditional three-act screenplay structure and ought to work. He also looks at screenplays (and plays) that have other structures (like Shakespeare's 5 acts). And he looks at movies that have messy stories that ought not to work, and yet did very well -- for example DUMB AND DUMBER.

He has an interesting analysis of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: what is the story actually about, amid all the swirling themes and conflicts.

He has another interesting analysis of PSYCHO, which famously breaks the rules by changing main characters -- and plots -- midway through. It shouldn't work, and yet, it's a classic.

I can't say that the book told me anything that I didn't know at some level. But an odd thing happened while I was reading it. I realized a pair of fairly serious flaws in a feature I was writing. I had given my hero a series of lucky breaks in the third act, when all the breaks should normally be going against her. I had also made the confrontation with the Big Bad the second-to-last set piece, when it needed to be the last.

(I was trying to save a Big Surprise for last. But you should probably never sacrifice drama for the sake of a surprise.)

It was an odd thing, because I know you should never give your hero a lucky break after the first act, and I'm not even sure Dan O'Bannon says that in his book. And he doesn't talk about drama vs. surprise. But just following his line of thinking about the movies he was dissecting got my brain working in ways that it had not been working, and I came to grip with two structural flaws that my readers and pitchees had not caught.

Any book that does that is worth a read.

Rona Edwards and Monika Skerbelis have written a fairly comprehensive guide to taking your film to festivals. "Complete Guide" is a fairly accurate description. They cover everything from choosing which festivals to target, to producer's reps and sales agents, to following up post-festival.

I think I would have appreciated the book more if they'd been a little more judgmental. For example, they have a whole chapter on producer's reps and sales agents. What I felt was missing is, "If you have this kind of film, don't bother with a sales agent, you need a producer's rep." Or vice versa. Is it worth making schwag? Is it a good idea to distribute your film on iTunes? They say how, but they don't say whether. Not all methods of marketing a book are equally useful. Which are best?

Still, if you've got a film you want to hawk around festivals, the book is probably worth its price. If it gives you some ideas, or clarifies something, it's worth the price of admission.

Howard Suber was one of my professors when I was at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; for years he team-taught alongside studio head Peter Guber in the Producers Program. His 2006 book, THE POWER OF FILM, talked about what makes a film great. He's just come out with a new book, LETTERS TO YOUNG FILMMAKERS, which is a sort of FAQ from his years of giving wise advice to people coming through the UCLA film program. The book is a series of brief letters answering questions about topics like inspiration, pitching, developing your writing, optioning your material, and why, if the screenplay is so important, Hollywood treats screenwriters like crap ... many of the same topics you may be interested in. Maybe he's got a letter for you.

I'm about halfway through SHOW ME THE FUNNY, by Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis. It's an intriguing concept for a book: take a nondescript sitcom premise ("recently divorced mom moves in with her ambitious daughter") and throw it to a slew of top comedy writers and see how they struggle with it on the spot. Then print the unedited interview.

They get interesting results. They get some of the solutions that make for awful, typical sitcom porridge ("throw in some funny neighbors"). Some latch onto a detail and try to build it into something. A few of them try to turn it into a feature. One of them, Dennis Klein, berates the writers for bringing him such a crap premise.

It's fun to see how all these writers bring something of themselves into the story. You get to see their process a bit, THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO-style. It could inspire you to take your own ideas in several different directions rather than just in the first direction that comes to mind. There are a few nuggets of fresh information here and there.

I can't help wishing it were a bit more compelling and interesting. I can't help thinking that if you brought such a bland premise to my peeps, you'd get more surprising results. I keep having a funny feeling about these interviews. These are top tv writers, and they are used to working successfully with network execs. They have learned not to say, "This is a crap premise," or "there is nothing here for me to work with." They are so used to being polite about bad ideas from producers or execs that they wind up hemmed in creatively, even here where there is no job available for them. After all, this will be published in a book. They don't want to get a reputation for being "difficult." Even Dennis Klein, who spends the entire interview ripping the authors a new one, calls back afterwards to say he was "doing schtick," when clearly, he was having an honest reaction.

Still, it is an interesting book, for showing you what twenty different "takes" might look like. Just think about that the next time an exec or producer asks you for your take on a piece of material.

I lived through a horrific and fascinating event. Various people have encouraged me to translate my reality into a book or movie. My occupation is in IT leadership, and I am by no means suited to write a book or screenplay; however, I would like to get the story out. What should I do?

To get a movie made out of your life, or some events in your life, you will realistically have to write a book. Producers option books, and they option newspaper stories that are in the headlines, but they don't usually option someone's life story unless it has already attracted attention.

Are you sure you're not cut out to write a book? I know a book seems kind of daunting, but if you break it down into chapters, and then pages, they're not that hard to write. Write one page a day, or five pages every weekend, and in a year, you have a book.

But if that seems too daunting, there are various writers out there that specialize in helping people tell their stories. They used to be called ghost writers, but these days they usually get a credit on the book ('as told to') since it turns out no one really expects celebrities and such to write their own books.

Once your book is a bestseller, the movies will come knocking.

Of course there is no guarantee that your book will become a bestseller. But you can hire a publicist and/or marketing people to push it. Your publisher, if you get a good one, might do this, but generally publishers expect authors to do most of the work marketing their book. Try to avoid self-publishing as many venues look down on self-published books. Having a legit novelist working with you will help.

If you want to hire a novelist to co-write a book with you, I can ask around what that would cost. It would depend of course on who, and whether you want them to do all the heavy lifting, or are willing to really collaborate.

Brooke Gladstone does the "On the Media" program on NPR, where she takes on how the media shape, distort and hype stories. Her podcast on the revolution in Egypt is particularly compelling. She's been one of the rare voices of reason in a media market saturated with blatant untruths.

Now she's got a book on the media. THE INFLUENCING MACHINE tracks the history of the news media and how they shape our world, from ancient Mayan publicists through Civil War journalists to Fox News. And it's a cleverly drawn graphic novel whose style is inspired by Scott McCloud's excellent Understanding Comics.

How do we get the media we deserve? Why does debunking a lie often make it stick in people's heads even more firmly? This book should be (and probably will be) required reading in communications courses. It's also worth reading by screenwriters, because every story teller needs to know how we understand the stories going on around us.



Check it out.

Full disclosure: Brooke is a dear friend, and I'm acknowledged in the book.

I'm trying to learn about game design. But I also like to read books that are about creating things that are not screenplays; often they give me fresher insight than screenwriting books do. (As Ram Dass said, "When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.")

Jesse Schell's ART OF GAME DESIGN: A BOOK OF LENSES presents a hundred ways to look at game design. It's about your process designing a game, seen from a multiplicity of angles. It's incidentally also about making movies, although it pretends not to be. It is also probably about fashion design, although I know nothing about fashion design.

For example, in dealing with dumb feedback, don't agree to the client's changes, or reject them. Instead, try to figure out what problem the client is trying to solve. Schell had a client ask for more chrome on the racing cars in a game. When Schell asked what problem the client was trying to solve, it turned out that the client thought the cars should go faster, but assumed they were going as fast as the game's computer processor could handle. He thought that more chrome would feel faster. Adding chrome probably wouldn't have fixed the problem. Lowering the virtual camera so it was closer to the ground did fix the problem.

Or, the "three layers of desire." What does the client say she wants? What does she think she wants? What does she really want? Your client may say she wants an educational game. But what she really wants is a space game; but she has money from an educational game publisher, so she has to deliver an educational game. That's why she's so hot on the spaceships in your educational game. What she really wants, though, is to become a game designer herself, a desire you must consider as you work with her.

Relating these ideas to the movie world is left as a fairly simple exercise.

I could go on, but then you might not go and read the book. It is really an extraordinarily smart book.